PeerJ leads a high-quality, low-cost new breed of open-access publisher

We all know by now that traditional academic publishing is in an appalling mess. Locking publicly funded research behind a paywall is completely unacceptable, and happily our government understands this. The Finch Report has rightly mandated that research must be published as open access. So profiteering publishers, seeing the writing on the wall, are offering authors open-access options. But corporations addicted to profit margins of 32-42% find it hard to give them up. As a result, while the world's leading open-access journal, PLOS ONE, is able to be financially self-sustaining by charging an article processing fee (APC) of $1,350 (£865) (and offering no-questions-asked waivers to authors without APC funding), the legacy publishers charge significantly more for inferior products. Where PLOS ONE imposes no limits on manuscript length, number of figures, use of colour etc., Elsevier's nearly-open-access articles cost $3,000 despite being limited in all these respects. Likewise, Springer's Open Choice costs $3,000 and Taylor & Francis's Open Select costs $2,950. It is maybe not surprising that the Finch Report's financial estimates assumed average APCs of £1,500-£2,000, and that some academics are baulking at such prices. Into that landscape come three exciting newcomers that are changing the market much more profoundly than the slow-moving incumbents yet realise. eLIFE is positioned as a highly selective and prestigious open-access alternative to Science and Nature. It published its first articles three months ago. PeerJ is a PLOS ONE-like mega-journal and it publishes its first articles today. Momentum has built further with the announcement of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) last month, a PLOS-like initiative for the humanities and social sciences. All three of these new kids on the block are radically innovative, all are moving fast, and all are backed by some serious muscle. eLIFE is sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society and Wellcome Trust; as a result, it's able to waive all APCs while it establishes itself, and may do so indefinitely. The academic steering committee of the OLH is packed with heavy hitters, and well on course to do for the humanities what PLOS did for the sciences. While the level of its APC has not yet been set, it has been established that no one will be prevented from publishing there by lack of funds. But it is PeerJ that has the most interesting financial approach. It doesn't exactly have an APC at all, instead charging a one-off fee for a lifetime membership that gives the right to publish repeatedly at no further cost. Membership plans start at $99, which allows you to publish one paper a year, or $299 gets you an infinite plan: publish anything you want, any time you like. (All authors of multi-author papers must be members.) ..."